Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. ~ Baruch Spinoza

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive. ~ Earl Warren

Justice is a concept involving the fair, moral, and impartial treatment of all persons. In its most general sense, it means according individuals what they actually deserve or merit, or are in some sense entitled to. Justice is a particularly foundational concept within most systems of law. From the perspective of pragmatism, it is the name for a fair result.

Justice is not a prize tendered to the good-natured, nor is it to be withheld from the ill-bred.

Charles L. Aarons, Hatch v. Lewinsky et al. (19 April 1945), p. 9.

The blessings we associate with a life of refinement and culture can be made universal. The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

Justice and equity are neither absolutely identical nor generically different. … If they are different, either the just or the equitable is not good; if both are good, they are the same thing. … For equity, while superior to one sort of justice, is itself just … Justice and equity are therefore the same thing, and both are good, though equity is the better.
The source of the difficulty is that equity, though just, is not legal justice, but a rectification of legal justice. The reason for this is that law is always a general statement, yet there are cases which it is not possible to cover in a general statement.

Consequently, if the republic is the weal of the people, and there is no people if it be not associated by a common acknowledgment of right, and if there is no right where there is no justice, then most certainly it follows that there is no republic where there is no justice.

Augustine, The City of God (c. 413-426), book 19, chapter 21; in The Works of Aurelius Augustine, trans. Marcus Dods (1871), vol. 2, p. 331.

The aim of justice is, as the Romans used to say, to give each his due, and in order for each to be given what is his, it is necessary that it already belong to him; to "give", in this sense, means to protect the right of possession. Each man gets "what belongs to him" in the course of voluntary exchanges that constitute the economic process, and, by virtue of the operation of the market, each receives for his contribution, precisely the amount that will impel him to increase the supply of the most urgently demanded commodities… Only when each man thereby gets what belongs to him, and someone wants to take it away from him, does a question of justice arise.

Faustino Ballve in "What Economics is Not About" in Essentials of Economics : A Brief Survey of Principles and Policies (1963), as translated by Arthur Goddard.

That which is altogether just shalt thou follow, that thou mayest live, and inherit the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee

The path of the righteous one is upright. Because you are upright, You will smooth out the course of the righteous. As we follow the path of your judgments, O Jehovah, Our hope is in you. We long for your name and your memorial. In the night I long for you with my whole being, Yes, my spirit keeps looking for you; For when there are judgments from you for the earth, The inhabitants of the land learn about righteousness.

When the imaginationsleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. … there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

If there has been any crime, it must be prosecuted. If there has been any property of the United States illegally transferred or leased, it must be recovered…. I propose to employ special counsel of high rank drawn from both political parties to bring such actions for the enforcement of the law. Counsel will be instructed to prosecute these cases in the courts so that if there is any guilt it will be punished; if there is any civil liability it will be enforced; if there is any fraud it will be revealed; and if there are any contracts which are illegal they will be canceled. Every law will be enforced. And every right of the people and the Government will be protected.

Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself, but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.
Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality, but by the higher duty I owe to myself. What would you think of me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death?

Benjamin Disraeli, "Agricultural Distress", speech in the House of Commons (February 11, 1851); in T. E. Kebbel, ed., Selected Speeches of the Late Right Honourable Earl of Beaconsfield (1882), vol. 1, p. 321.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.

Frederick DouglassSpeech on the twenty-fourth anniversary of Emancipation in the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C. (April 1886).

Social equality and economic protection of the individual appeared to me always as the important communal aims of the state. Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has preserved me from feeling isolated.

Albert Einstein, in "My Credo", a speech to the German League of Human Rights, Berlin (Autumn 1932), as published in Einstein: A Life in Science (1994) by Michael White and John Gribbin, p. 262.

Because the sentence against an evil deed is not promptly executed, the human heart is filled with the desire to commit evil—

because the sinner does evil a hundred times and survives. Though indeed I know that it shall be well with those who fearGod, for their reverence toward him; and that it shall not be well with the wicked, who shall not prolong their shadowy days, for their lack of reverence toward God. This is a vanity that occurs on earth: there are those who are just but are treated as though they had done evil, and those who are wicked but are treated as though they had done justly. This, too, I say is vanity.

Variation on a traditional proverb, appeared in various forms over the millennia. Traditionally refers to gods or (later) Christian God rather than justice. Early recorded form of sentiment by Euripides circa 405 BCE The Bacchae, line 882, translated as:

In contemporary usage, more often “wheels of justice” than “mills of justice”, with both “turn slowly” and “grind slowly” being common. It is often stated in abbreviated form as “the wheels of justice turn slowly”.

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been, and ever will be, pursued, until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. … If men were angels, no government would be necessary.

We ought always to deal justly, not only with those who are just to us, but likewise to those who endeavor to injure us; and this, for fear lest by rendering them evil for evil, we should fall into the same vice.

Love, like truth and beauty, is concrete. Love is not fundamentally a sweet feeling; not, at heart, a matter of sentiment, attachment, or being "drawn toward". Love is active, effective, a matter of making reciprocal and mutually beneficial relation with one's friends and enemies. Love creates righteousness, or justice, here on earth. To make love is to make justice. As advocates and activists for justice know, loving involves struggle, resistance, risk. People working today on behalf of women, blacks, lesbians and gay men, the aging, the poor in this country and elsewhere know that making justice is not a warm, fuzzy experience. I think also that sexual lovers and good friends know that the most compelling relationships demand hard work, patience, and a willingness to endure tensions and anxiety in creating mutually empowering bonds.
For this reason loving involves commitment. We are not automatic lovers of self, others, world, or God. Love does not just happen. We are not love machines, puppets on the strings of a deity called "love". Love is a choice — not simply, or necessarily, a rational choice, but rather a willingness to be present to others without pretense or guile. Love is a conversion to humanity — a willingness to participate with others in the healing of a broken world and broken lives. Love is the choice to experience life as a member of the human family, a partner in the dance of life, rather than as an alien in the world or as a deity above the world, aloof and apart from human flesh.

All of our punishment institutions, including jails, laws, church confessionals, and so forth, are systems of illusion. The order of the universe, the infinite justice of yin and yang, naturally takes care of all motion and compensation. We don't need to invent arbitrary ways to make balance with punishments.

The legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done.

Human justice is very prolix, and yet at times quite mediocre; divine justice is more concise and needs no information from the prosecution, no legal papers, no interrogation of witnesses, but makes the guilty one his own informer and helps him with eternity’s memory.

We regard it as an onerous but yet in another regard also a satisfying and fascinating task to be a servant of justice who discovers guilt and crime. We are amazed at such a person’s acquaintance with the human heart, with all the evasions and fabrications, even the most sophistical: how he is able to remember from year to year the most insignificant things merely in order to secure, if possible, a clue; how he, just by looking at the circumstances, seems to be able to conjure them into giving evidence against the guilty one; how nothing is too trivial for his attention, provided it could clarify his construction of the crime.

We admire it when such a servant of justice, by persevering with what he calls a really inveterate and foxy dissembler, succeeds in tearing off his disguise, and exposing his guilt. Should it not be just as satisfying, just as fascinating, to discover by really persevering with what we call usually dastardly behavior that it was something totally different, something well intentioned. Let the judge appointed by the state, let the servant of justice work at discovering guilt and crime; the rest of us are called to be neither judges nor servants of justice, but on the contrary are called by God to love, that is, with the aid of a mitigating explanation to hide a multitude of sins.

True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.

Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1955 responding to an accusation that he was "disturbing the peace" by his activism during the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, as quoted in Let the Trumpet Sound : A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr (1982) by Stephen B. Oates.

Let me make one more remark suggested by this trial and by others. There is no accepted test of civilization. It is not wealth, or the degree of comfort, or the average duration of life, or the increase of knowledge. All such tests would be disputed. In default of any other measure, may it not be suggested that as good a measure as any is the degree to which justice is carried out, the degree to which men are sensitive as to wrong-doing and desirous to right it? If that be the test, a trial such as that of Servetus is a trial of the people among whom it takes place, and his condemnation is theirs also.

Sir John MacDonell, Historical Trials (1927), chapter 7, p. 148. Miguel Serveto, known as Michael Servetus, was imprisoned in Geneva at John Calvin's request and burned at the stake as a heretic in 1553.

Anyone who recognizes the eudemonistic character of all ethical valuation is exempt from further discussion of ethical Socialism. For such a one the Moral does not stand outside the scale of values which comprises all values of life. For him no moral ethic is valid per se. He must first be allowed to inquire why it is so rated. He can never reject that which has been recognized as beneficial and reasonable simply because a norm, based on some mysterious intuition, declares it to be immoral—a norm the sense and purpose of which he is not entitled even to investigate. His principle is not fiat iustitia, pereat mundus, (let justice be done, though the world perish), but fiat iustitia, ne pereat mundus (let justice be done, lest the world perish).

What the marchers on Washington knew, what the marchers in Selma knew, what folks like Julian Bond knew, what the marchers in this room still know, is that justice is not only the absence of oppression, it is the presence of opportunity. Justice is giving every child a shot at a great education no matter what zip code they’re born into. Justice is giving everyone willing to work hard the chance at a good job with good wages, no matter what their name is, what their skin color is, where they live. Justice is living up to the common creed that says, I am my brother’s keeper and my sister’s keeper. Justice is making sure every young person knows they are special and they are important and that their lives matter -- not because they heard it in a hashtag, but because of the love they feel every single day not just love from their parents, not just love from their neighborhood, but love from police, love from politicians. Love from somebody who lives on the other side of the country, but says, that young person is still important to me. That’s what justice is.

Barack Obama, Remarks by the President at the NAACP Conference at Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (July 14, 2015)

Conscience is the chamber of justice.

Origen, quoted in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by James Wood, p. 46.

There is no sweeter delight than that the soul should be charged through and through with justice, exercising itself in her eternal principles and doctrines and leaving no vacant place into which injustice can make its way.

The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts. Aristocratic and caste societies are unjust because they make these contingencies the ascriptive basis for belonging to more or less enclosed and privileged social classes. The basic structure of these societies incorporates the arbitrariness found in nature. But there is no necessity for men to resign themselves to these contingencies. The social system is not an unchangeable order beyond human control but a pattern of human action.

Of all the officers of the Government, those of the Department of Justice should be kept most free from any suspicion of improper action on partisan or factional grounds, so that there shall be gradually a growth, even though a slow growth, in the knowledge that the Federal courts and the representatives of the Federal Department of Justice insist on meting out even-handed justice to all.

The higher judge is the universal and absolute Spirit alone — the World-Spirit … The relation of one particular State to another presents, on the largest possible scale, the most shifting play of individual passions, interests, aims, talents, virtues, power, injustice, vice, and mere external chance. … Out of this dialectic rises the universal Spirit, the unlimited World-Spirit, pronouncing its judgement — and its judgement is the highest — upon the Nations of the World's History; for the History of the World is the World's court of justice.

I have done the state some service, and they know't;
No more of that, I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice.

The world in which we live falls short in terms of justice in many different ways. We have reason to do what we can to remove diagnosable injustice to the extent possible. Subjecting our values to scrutiny by asking probing questions, drawing on many sources, may be a good beginning. Broadening that exercise by considering the perspectives of others – from far as well as near – would make sense here, for reasons that Smith had discussed with much clarity a quarter of a millennium ago.

Nature offers nothing that can be called this man's rather than another's; but under nature everything belongs to all — that is, they have authority to claim it for themselves. But under dominion, where it is by common law determined what belongs to this man, and what to that, he is called just who has a constant will to render to every man his own, but he unjust who strives, on the contrary, to make his own that which belongs to another.

Earl Warren, in "The Law and the Future" in Fortune magazine (November 1955).

Justice, under capitalism, works not from a notion of obedience to moral law, or to conscience, or to compassion, but from the assumption of a duty to preserve a social order and the legal “rights” that constitute that order, especially the right to property. … It comes to this: that decision will seem most just which preserves the system of justice even if the system is itself routinely unjust.

Truth is its [justice's] handmaid, freedom is its child, peace is its companion, safety walks in its steps, victory follows in its train; it is the brightest emanation from the gospel; it is the attribute of God.

There are numerous versions and translations of statements referred to as "The Circle of Justice". Ibn Khaldun in the Muqaddimah states that it originates with Khosrau I based on statements of Aristotle.

The world is a garden the fence of which is the dynasty.
The dynasty is an authority through which life is given proper behavior.
Proper behavior is a policy directed by the ruler.
The ruler is an institution supported by the soldiers.
The soldiers are helpers who are maintained by money.
Money is sustenance brought together by the subjects.
The subjects are servants who are protected by justice.
Justice is something familiar (harmonious) and through it, the world persists.
The world is a garden... and then it begins again … they are held together in a circle with no definite beginning or end.

No one is fit to govern, save he who is mild without weakness and strong without harshness. They used to say :
There can be no government without men,
No men without money,
No money without prosperity,
And no prosperity without justice and good administration.

The "Circle of Justice" as quoted in Human Rights in Islam (1980) by Parveen Shaukat Ali, p. 72.

The world is a garden for the state to master.
The state is power supported by the law.
The law is policy administered by the king.
The king is a shepherd supported by the army.
The army are assistants provided for by taxation.
Taxation is sustenance gathered by subjects.
Subjects are slaves provided for by justice.
Justice is that by which the rectitude of the world subsists.

The Counsels of Alexander, presented to the Timurid prince Baysunghur (1495–1497). Translated and quoted in Timur and the Princely Vision : Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century (1989) by Thomas W. Lentz and Glenn D. Lowry.

There is not in this country one rule by which the rich are governed, and another for the poor. No man has justice meted out to him by a different measure on account of his rank or fortune, from what would be done if he were destitute of both. Every invasion of property is judged of by the same rule; every injury is compensated in the same way; and every crime is restrained by the same punishment, be the condition of the offender what it may. It is in this alone that true equality can exist in society.

"There's the King's Messenger. He's in prison now, being punished: and the trial doesn't begin until next Wednesday: and of course the crime comes last of all".

"Suppose he never commits the crime?" said Alice.

"That would be all the better, wouldn't it?" the Queen said.

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 5. Logical Nonsense: The Works of Lewis Carroll, ed. Philip C. Blackburn and Lionel White, p. 195 (1934). First published in 1872.

That it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer, is a Maxim that has been long and generally approved.

Benjamin Franklin, letter to Benjamin Vaughan, March 14, 1785. The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert H. Smyth, vol. 9, p. 293 (1906). He was echoing Voltaire, "that generous Maxim, that 'tis much more Prudence to acquit two Persons, tho' actually guilty, than to pass Sentence of Condemnation on one that is virtuous and innocent. Zadig, chapter 6, p. 53 (1749, reprinted 1974). Sir William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, 9th ed., book 4, chapter 27, p. 358 (1783, reprinted 1978), says, "For the law holds, that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer".

Oh Justice, when expelled from other habitations, make this thy dwelling place.

William Jewell, inscription over the door of the Boone County, Missouri, Court House. North Todd Gentry, The Bench and Bar of Boone County, Missouri, p. 81–82 (1916). Lawyers trying cases in the court house were known to make "eloquent and effective" references to the motto. Walter Ridgway, "Boone County's Justice Motto", Missouri Historical Review, October 1926, p. 114–16.

Dear son, if you come to reign do that which befits a king, that is, be so just as to deviate in nothing from justice, whatever may befall you. If a poor man goes to law with one who is rich, support the poor rather than the rich man until you know the truth, and when the truth is known, do that which is just.

Louis IX, king of France. Louis Gazagne, The Saint on Horseback: A Story of St. Louis IX, King of France, p. 73 (1953). Another translation: "To keep right and justice be thou righteous and steady with thy people, without turning to the right hand or to the left, but straight forward, and uphold the poor man's suit until the truth be made manifest". Jean de Joinville, The History of St. Louis, ed. Natalis de Wailly, trans. Joan Evans, book 2, chapter 145, p. 225 (1938). In some translations, this is paragraph 747.

We said that a single injustice, a single crime, a single illegality, particularly if it is officially recorded, confirmed, a single wrong to humanity, a single wrong to justice and to right, particularly if it is universally, legally, nationally, commodiously accepted, that a single crime shatters and is sufficient to shatter the whole social pact, the whole social contract, that a single legal crime, a single dishonorable act will bring about the loss of one's honor, the dishonor of a whole people. It is a touch of gangrene that corrupts the entire body.

Charles Péguy, in reference to the Dreyfus trial, Men and Saints, trans. Anne and Julian Green, p. 11 (1944).

They have a Right to censure, that have a Heart to help: The rest is Cruelty, not Justice.

Salvation for a race, nation, or class must come from within. Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted. Freedom and justice must be struggled for by the oppressed of all lands and races, and the struggle must be continuous, for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political and religious relationships.

Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens.

Author unknown. Inscription over the 10th Street entrance of the U.S. Department of Justice Building, Washington, D.C. This has been attributed to Plato, but is Reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).